The Senate voted 51 to 45 on Tuesday to confirm Howard Lutnick as President Trump's trade secretary and hired one of the leading government officials who will help to monitor a agenda for tariffs and protectionism.
Mr. Lutnick, Managing Director of the financial service company Cantor Fitzgerald, became a central economic consultant of Mr. Trump last year and headed his transition team. He defended the tariffs as an instrument to protect the US industries from international competition, promoted lower corporate taxes and required an expansion of energy generation.
As Commercial Secretary, Mr. Lutnick will take over a broad portfolio that includes the defense of the US business interests worldwide and the monitoring of the restrictions on technology exports to countries such as China.
At his hearing last month, Lutnick said at his hearing last month that he would take a hard attitude towards monitoring the technology sales by the department to China and support the US export controls with the risk of tariffs. He said that the latest technology for artificial intelligence published by the Chinese start-up Deepseek was underpinned by the open platform of meta and chips sold by the US company Nvidia.
“We have to stop helping them,” said Lutnick about China and added: “I will be very strong.”
If the United States resume economic negotiations with the country, Mr. Lutnick will be played a central role. Mr. Trump said the new Minister of Commerce would monitor the work of the United States' office, which is traditionally the center of trade policy.
Mr. Lutnick will assume that responsibility as Mr. Trump has already taken measures to improve the global trading system. The President threatened tariffs in Canada and Mexico, raised China and initiated a process to impose so-called mutual tariffs. The trade department will work with other federal authorities to determine the tariff rates for other countries.
Mr. Lutnick will also be responsible for monitoring and potentially revision programs that were top priorities for bidges management. This includes subsidies for US chip manufacturers as part of the law on chips and science of 2022 and the efforts to ensure at least 6.25 million households and locations across the country.
Mr. Lutnick, a wealthy investor, has a network of connections that could question concerns about potential conflicts of interest, since he leads the way to the state guidelines that have a significant impact on companies and markets and possibly enrich former customers or partners.
For example, he has financial interests in the mining industry in Greenland via Cantor Fitzgerald. Cantor has invested in critical metals, a company that proposed mining estates and minerals in Greenland. Mr. Trump has repeatedly proposed to buy Greenland, an autonomous territory within the Kingdom Demark.
A financial disclosure that Mr. Lutnick submitted last month showed that the executive positions that he held in more than 800 individual companies. It has also been found that he received an income, distributions and bonuses of more than 350 million US dollars from his network of financial services and real estate companies in the past two years.
Mr. Lutnick, who worked on Wall Street for decades, received national attention when many employees of Cantor Fitzgerald, the brokerage company, in which he was president and managing director, died on September 11 at the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.